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Green Tech Fact Check with Joel Meadows
1.1k Plays3 months ago
My guest today is Joel Meadows, a phenomenal human who happens to be a permaculture teacher, rocket oven engineer, energy geek, green tech sceptic, sculptor, illustrator, musician and composting ninja.
This is one epic episode that encompasses:
🌟Are renewables really all that?
🌟Why we’re using more fossil fuels than ever *cry*.
🌟Smart phone free life.
🌟Being deliberately abnormal.
🌟ROCKET OVENS.
🌟Why everyone is practical + can learn shit.
🌟Three steps to household energy resilience.
We recorded this convo at Joel’s kitchen table, in his majestic solar passive strawbale home after gorging ourselves on a garden omelette and roasted wattleseeds.
I wrote about the experience in neurotic detail over on Substack and included masses of photos of Joel’s home + garden for your voyeuristic needs. Here it is.
🧙♀️LINKY POOS
[video] Joel’s intro to hot composting
[video] A little explanatory video about YIMBY
[website] YIMBY (note all the tasty resources including the 'Compost Conversation' articles published each week in the Midland Express)
[video] Joe’s Permaqueer talk on appropriate technology
[video] Take a virtual tour of Joel’s house
[eBook] Joel + Tim Barker’s Rocket Oven how-to book
***Join the not-culty-at-all Reskillience community on Patreon***
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Reskillions
00:00:03
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie, and you're tuned into Reskillions, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't. I'm gratefully recording in Jara country, central Victoria, where everyone's having babies, the birds, the beasts, and some of my very best friends, all bursting with spring fecundity.
Unpacking 'Fecund' and Creativity
00:00:32
Speaker
Fecund is a great word to use at this time of year, F-E-C-U-N-D. Even though it sounds like an expletive, it actually refers to the ability to produce offspring, or fertility in general, like having a fecund imagination, a fecund orchard, a fecund podcast.
00:00:54
Speaker
But truly the podcast isn't a great example of fecundity right now because it has taken me ages to birth this episode. Not because there's anything wrong with it, but because it is so very right that I tried with all of my might to write the best intro ever, but got mired in the details, which is classic me.
00:01:16
Speaker
So actually, I'm going to read you an excerpt from my sub-stack post about it because I needed to tell you that I have a sub-stack anyway and that it is filled with juicy and neurotic podcast reflections and, in this case, a crapload of photos of my guest's home and garden because we all love a good snoop.
Meet Joel Meadows: From Resistance to Resonance
00:01:35
Speaker
My guest today is Joel Meadows, a legendary permaculture teacher, rocket oven engineer, energy geek, green tech skeptic, sculptor, illustrator, musician, bicycle fiend, and compost extraordinaire, who agreed to an in-person interview because he lives just down the road from us.
00:01:55
Speaker
Joel is a phenomenal human, and this conversation will tickle the pickle of anyone who's kind of skeptical about the green energy transition, or anyone who wants to hear from someone who's never had a smartphone and possesses pre-social media levels of dopamine.
00:02:11
Speaker
Stick around to the end of the episode for listener shoutouts and other happenings in the reskillosphere. And for now, here's an excerpt from my Substack post about lunch and chats with Joel Meadows. You'll find the link to the full post in the show notes.
00:02:28
Speaker
I was harbouring quite a bit of resistance to Joel's interview. It was my first in-person conversation for ages, and besides a brief encounter on the street one morning, we'd never properly met. I felt rusty and shy. I was also carrying a heavy sense of incompetence after my last interview with Robin Mundy
00:02:48
Speaker
You know when you're midway through a sentence and suddenly realise you have no idea what you're saying, where you're going, or how to stop? That happened multiple times during the call, despite Robin's glorious vibes, and my inner critic gorged itself on the fairy floss of failure. Thank God for the edit suite.
00:03:06
Speaker
Anyway, Joel had been on my resculience radar for a very long time because I kept hearing people rave about his teaching style, and he also has a raft of interesting specialties including rocket ovens and renewable energy.
00:03:21
Speaker
I actually had an email to Joel festering away in my drafts the day that I spotted him at a local cafe, and I couldn't help but skip over and introduce myself, asking him on to the podcast in person. Interrupting someone's morning coffee is akin to waking a sleepwalker, but Joel took it in his stride and matched my invitation by suggesting I come and have lunch at his family home and conduct the interview there.
Sustainable Living: Joel's Property
00:03:46
Speaker
Joel's property is on the eastern side of Castle Main, where the houses trickle towards the forest. It's one and three quarter acres of, as Joel will tell you, mining knackered country that eats cubic metres of compost for breakfast.
00:04:01
Speaker
Before I was halfway out of the car, Joel was leading me in the direction of his gravity-assisted hot composting bays, which you don't turn so much as push downhill. Smart. It was a beautiful winter's day. We gazed out over the orchards and gardens where rivers of bees flowed between blossoms and hives. Chooks busied themselves scratching and deep green stands of nettle declared that yes, the compost is working.
00:04:29
Speaker
You can read the rest of the reflection over on substack and sink into the conversation we shared at Joel's kitchen table right now. Thanks for listening.
Tech Skepticism: Smartphones and Social Skills?
00:04:41
Speaker
You've never had a smartphone? I've never had a phone, really. I mean, we had a sight phone here while I was building, but it stayed in the shed. So it was really just so I could make calls because we didn't have a line on. But yeah, no, I don't. Yeah. And I suppose by now I've kind of I've got my ways of working. I mean, they're the same ways that everyone used to operate by. It's just that. How did you not get sucked into the tech vortex?
00:05:10
Speaker
Um, I suppose because I
00:05:15
Speaker
saw it and didn't like it straight up like i didn't like what it represented or what it the possibilities just the whole thing of like you know people were starting to take calls in public places so i didn't like that do you know what i mean like it was like well hang on a sec we're we're all on this train and you're having this phone conversation it's like converse with us don't you know like yeah i suppose it and it and early on it was really it was associated with with rich people
00:05:45
Speaker
And then it sort of, but then it became associated with tradies too. It's like, well, you gotta, you gotta, you know, get out there and be sprucing for business while you're working. But then it was, you know, it became this thing of all, they're on their phone, not doing their work. So I don't know. I suppose I've always had a bad connotation with it. And then as, as they've made you connected to the internet, they've done, they've taken away a lot of skills that I like, like map reading or, um, you know,
00:06:14
Speaker
general knowledge or you know like all of these things that people go to their phone for when when actually they're kind of skills that I would like to hone myself. This is where someone knocked on Joel's front door trying to sell him mulch or something equally as ironic. Sorry for the interruption. Let's cut back into the conversation.
00:06:42
Speaker
Oh, you're funny. No, I have two questions based on what you were riffing off just now. Yeah. Do you strike up conversations with people on public transport often? Far more than other people do. OK, I think we'll come back to that. And two, what makes you able to cut away from the herd? Because that's quite a strength of character to be able to resist something that is compelling. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm I suppose
00:07:11
Speaker
I've always felt like a little bit of an outsider and I suppose then choosing to be an outsider kind of just, you know, becomes a your own confirmation bias. In defiance. Yeah, so it's probably something slightly unhealthy in my character as well, you know, or has the potential to be both a superpower and a problematic obsession. Where did that start?
00:07:37
Speaker
When I was two, my family moved to West Papua. And so I was there for four years and then we came back. So I basically don't remember Australia. I remember West Papua. I remember the indigenous people. I remember the Indonesian people, the military, American expats. Like it was just a totally amazing place as a kid to be immersed in. And then I came to Australia and it was just like,
00:08:08
Speaker
it felt weird you know things like escalators and automatic opening doors which is the first thing we saw at the airport it's just like this is weird like you know this place is weird and so i spoke and then also coming yeah then
00:08:23
Speaker
I started to go to school and actually feeling like a bit of an outsider.
Permaculture Values and Practices
00:08:28
Speaker
I'd seen all of this other stuff and I'd experienced the world in a very different way to just suburban life in Melbourne.
00:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, so I probably always have and as I said, it's probably has both unhealthy and healthy characteristics. So I've yet to be to be different to everyone else is kind of feels like home to me a little bit. So which is why I've the permaculture stuff is I'm totally comfortable with having a composting toilet in my house and, you know, and riding my bicycle everywhere and not using much and things like things like that don't they feel pretty
00:09:08
Speaker
they feel home territory to me. One of my greatest fears is that permaculture becomes super popular and then I lose my... Yeah, you stayed just... Yeah, that's right. Are you, does that keep you up all night as well? I think it keeps me up, but no, but I think there is, yeah, I think that's true. I think there is...
00:09:27
Speaker
a tendency with that it's like yeah if you how much do you want people to really sign up to this because it's partly you do with all your heart want people to take this stuff seriously um but then there's another thing of it's like actually if it was totally mainstream and I see that sometimes I mean I'm 51
00:09:47
Speaker
And I have seen waves of things, you know, things that probably in my 20s, I thought I wanted to see happen. I've seen them happen, but they haven't played out like I thought, you know. And so there's solar panels everywhere. And I thought that was going to be a great thing. But actually, I feel like I look at it now and go, actually, that's not it. Like, actually, it's all these perverse outcomes. So which which also
00:10:09
Speaker
makes me a bit cautious of kind of being too confident of feeling like I have the answers to things because probably if I'd waved my magic wand in my 20s it still wouldn't have played out like I wanted. Yeah that's right so I think sometimes kind of going hang on a sec just be yeah be careful check what you check what you think is the answer to things but then yeah I suppose the other aspect of it is
00:10:35
Speaker
I'm doing it as much as I can so I'm kind of, you know, I've built the house that I wanted to live in and I've, you know, I try and actually practice these things and kind of seeing where they work or don't work and having a living example of those things because I, yeah, and I teach permaculture and I've
00:10:55
Speaker
Occasionally I've taught subjects around stuff that I don't really know much about and I haven't lived and I hate it. It makes me feel really uncomfortable. So I really don't like doing it. I like teaching from places where I've experimented with, I've lived it.
00:11:11
Speaker
At least to a certain level. And I realized too, within that, there's a risk too, because the tendency is, well, you've lived one kind of life, one kind of reality, and you have to be careful that you don't universalize that to everything. So yeah, as much as possible, when I show people things, if I show people around the house, I go,
00:11:30
Speaker
Don't copy anything I've done, you know Don't that like watch it have a look at it see why I've done it You might be applicable to you, but you've got to check this against your life Permaculture principles and thinking like it can't just be a
00:11:46
Speaker
You know i do this thing like what i used to talk them to call them peremical to widgets you know i can't be that collect the set of widgets that then you know add up to a permaculture life you know you got the wicking bed you got the compost toilet and you've got the you know rocket stove it's like woohoo yeah but they defeat the purpose in as much as there isn't a prescription it's a response yeah that's right yeah yeah and it might be you know like
00:12:13
Speaker
you know, if you live somewhere and there's not a whole lot of twigs lying on the ground and that's not a readily available fuel source, rocket stoves mightn't be a very good solution for you. You know, so it's not it's yeah, it's definitely not the answer for everyone. You've got to you've got to understand the yeah, what your what your resource base is and what's what's going on in your world. That's which is that I still think the fundamental permaculture principle is observe and interact. It's always that thing of paying attention
00:12:43
Speaker
to where you are, what's going on, and only from that can you start to make better decisions.
Human Interactions: From Bicycles to Childhood Memories
00:12:50
Speaker
Yeah, well, you've already opened up so many avenues for exploration in my mind. So I'm just going to put my blinkers on for a second and go back to my curiosity around what's your in with surly people who are sucked into their screen face first on public transport? Or do you just look for people who are open and receptive and you might start a conversation with them? Like, what's your, what's your like? Yeah, I like making eye contact with people in public because I think it's with we don't do it very much. So and because I don't have a phone,
00:13:20
Speaker
often the first I mean sometimes I'll I'll you know I'll have a book I'm reading or sometimes I'll be you know working on an article on my laptop so I'm not I'm not suggesting I'm pure in that in that regard but yeah I do if I go and sit in the train the first thing I usually do is try and actually look around and catch make eye contact with people and it's like it's almost only kids kids are about the only people who look at you anymore so but yeah I do and even like
00:13:46
Speaker
even having a bike like if I take because you know public transport and bikes what a combination it's amazing how far like you can pretty much get anywhere in the state of Victoria in the combination of public transport and bicycles I mean you can get anywhere with just bicycles but that combination allows you within a day or so you could get almost anywhere it's pretty amazing but and the other thing is because it's a bit awkward
00:14:11
Speaker
you then have to interact with people. So if I'm putting my bike on a V-line train and it's like there's other bikes there, I've got to find out who the bike owner is because it's like I can't just stack it in and they need to get out the next stop. So we suddenly need to have a interaction and we've got to talk. And it's funny how resistant people are to that often, even though it's like it makes such sense for us to start by going
00:14:35
Speaker
Hi, you know, where are you getting off? And it's, yeah, sometimes the conversations that flow out of that connection are fantastic or it's someone's plunked a whole lot of big suitcases and I can't get my bike on, but it's like I ask if I can put them up on the luggage thing, but maybe I'll have to help them get them down. And so, you know, we chat.
00:14:53
Speaker
And maybe it's one of the most powerful remedies right now. The othering in the polarisation is simply to remind ourselves that people are on the whole pretty friendly, pretty normal, pretty willing to engage in a nice conversation and share something of themselves and then that really
00:15:11
Speaker
It's hard to hold that and the othering. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, I'm trying. I mean, yeah, the last time I caught a train back from Melbourne, I had a conversation with a renowned ice addict from around here who lots of people are totally scared of. But in this context, his dog had just died. And we had a conversation about it.
00:15:30
Speaker
he was tearing up and I was there giving him a bit of a shoulder to cry on like it's yeah it's quite remarkable sometimes that leveling that just being able to talk to people you know public space so yeah so not having a phone I think I get more of those interactions than a lot of people do yeah I've been thinking a lot about this lately I think Nate Hagans mentioned something around
00:15:54
Speaker
How important our brain chemistry is going to be in terms of adaptation and simply doing the things we need to do and facing into Whatever is coming and already happening and I think about dopamine and our entrainment in the quick hits of dopamine Which then not only makes us feel like we're noshing on kind of mental junk. It's also this longer form of
00:16:17
Speaker
erosion of our persistence and working towards things that take a lot of time and delayed gratification that might be really great for us and our people and our community and the planet but we're just not kind of mentally tenacious enough to do anymore and I think it's my phone. It's 15 years of
00:16:38
Speaker
kind of getting those little sugary hits like a mouse and now I've got to re, I don't know, get some mental fitness back into the picture or something, whereas you've sidestepped that all together.
Exploring Practical Skills and Community Projects
00:16:50
Speaker
Maybe, maybe, I mean it's still there though, it's amazing how it creeps in, you know, just like how many
00:16:57
Speaker
you know because I still use a computer and so I still have it you know I have access to the internet and then I've got these things that are using exactly that same you know process to try and capture me and and keep me hooked you know so and for me probably my my weak spot is um is like buying things secondhand because like that's all moved away from you know it used to be in newspapers and then it moved online and then it became
00:17:23
Speaker
the purview of, you know, Facebook marketplace. And so it becomes this thing of, you know, even though I don't do Facebook at all, that's the only place you can buy secondhand things now. Your results have been co-opted. That's right. But, you know, it's very, yeah, it's it's kind of, yeah, I can see how all of those those addictive things are there, you know, and even, yes, even the wonderfully, you know, noble art of buying things secondhand can be perverted. A bunch of perverts.
00:17:53
Speaker
All right, we're definitely up in the treetops at the moment and I would like to just ground Come back down to the ground and really understand who you are and what you get up to for myself as much as anyone listening so I wonder if you can paint a bit of a picture of your day-to-day existence and What work you're doing in the world? Yeah, okay so I
00:18:18
Speaker
I definitely said that I'm a permaculture educator. You didn't say that. Yeah, which I do do that. So I teach on permaculture courses around the place and my, you know, all in Victoria or pretty much in the sort of the north western side of Victoria into Melbourne. But
00:18:39
Speaker
But at the moment, I'm actually not doing very much of that because there's been a bunch of courses not running, which is kind of interesting and, you know, exciting in its own way. So I do do a range of volunteer work in my community as well. So at the moment of the last four years or so, I've been very busy with that's a terrible term, very busy. I have put a lot of time into
00:19:08
Speaker
a project called Yes In My Backyard, YIMBY, which is a backyard composting, community composting model and
00:19:20
Speaker
Yeah, and I might talk about that in a bit more detail if that comes out. But I also make things, I've built the house that we're in at the moment. Yes, it's an in-situ interview. That's right, inside one of my things. And yeah, and I'm very interested in the making of things, be it houses or windows or furniture or devices that help us.
00:19:46
Speaker
Cook food or things like that. So I've got yeah, I've got a bit of an interest in efficient combustion and make a range of Rocket stoves and other wood burning efficient wood burning things and a lot of it sort of it in there I suppose it's a bit like being an inventor as in I do a lot of sort of experimental stuff but then I try and live with it and use it or I
00:20:10
Speaker
build it for other people who I can then spend time observing how they use it and how it holds up to the rigors of being heated and cooled regularly and things like that because there's things that involve wood fire almost always rip themselves to shreds you know over however many years like this you won't find
00:20:28
Speaker
you won't find wood fired devices that are 100 years old because they're not in not in regular use because they destroy themselves because of the expansion contraction stresses which is kind of
00:20:45
Speaker
awful and wonderful at the same time. But yeah, it's one of those things I'm interested in is how we do these things as sort of simply and for longevity as we can without getting too obsessed about it. And so I do a little bit of like
00:21:06
Speaker
consulting work sort of on people's building designs or on their permaculture property designs. And I run this property too. So yeah, this is a one and three quarter acre property on the edge of Castle Main in central Victoria. We've got
00:21:24
Speaker
50 odd fruit and nut trees in our orchards and lots of veggie gardens and chooks and bees and lots of other lots of food projects i think we do yeah we do a lot of we you know i don't like a lot of permaculture people we you know make bread and yogurt and
00:21:45
Speaker
Meads and vinegars and all those kinds of things. So yeah, and that's that's that's always been a big component of what we do is sort of trying to Grow things and to take them through to being useful useful things to eat and live on Yeah, so it's a bit of a spread. It's quite a spread. No goats
00:22:04
Speaker
No goats. We've talked for years about goats, but for me, if there are going to be goats, I think it has to be a goat share, which we have. We have a few people who have talked about it, but haven't quite clicked over into that. Takes a village to raise a goat. Yeah, I think it does. And trying to work out the good systems for that. And I think, too, that
00:22:26
Speaker
I mean, we're right on the National Park and Forest Creek. And there's definitely room for, you know, Blackberry and Gorse to be a good part of a goat's diet. And we could probably do that in an interesting relationship with the
00:22:43
Speaker
park management and potentially reciprocal but also just yeah how to how to manage that well still hasn't been been worked out yet pretty slippery creatures yeah and i'm sure they would love to go feral yeah that's right yeah so yeah we'd need to definitely control that yeah so going back to your youth um you arrived from west parkour yeah and what was your childhood and what were your early years like
00:23:09
Speaker
So I grew up in from that point on I was in the Dandenong so I was living on the edge of Mount Dandenong on a dirt road with access to the bush sort of behind me but then suburbia in front of me so it was kind of it was always a little bit of you know I had lots of wild place bases I had a lot of freedom you know by the time I was riding my bike I kind of could
00:23:32
Speaker
you know, like I would ride over Mount Dandenong to Monbulk and I'd ride down to friend's places in rural Barkan, like, and then with the train network, suddenly all of Melbourne opened up. So I kind of had access to all of that, but also that those sort of wild push spaces. So I do feel like I had had an interesting hybridized, you know, it wasn't a country upbringing, but it definitely wasn't a classic city or suburban upbringing either. So, yeah, it felt that and, you know, I'm in my, yeah, my mum
00:24:03
Speaker
grew some food and we had a compost pile and things like that but she she was a single mum with a lot of you know things that I played and didn't really have that much time to get seriously into that stuff so definitely a lot of plants and growing and surrounded by greenery but not like most of my sort of food growing skills and stuff I've learned as an adult and yeah my dad my dad died when I was when I was young so just before we came back
00:24:28
Speaker
And I kind of had, you know, I had inherited a box of tools that set into the house and got rusty. And I kind of knew how to use them, but didn't really. And so a lot of the, like, as a lot of people kind of go, oh, you've, you've grown up with all of these skills and say, no, I haven't. I've actually, I've learned most of the things I've learned about building houses and making things and things that are metal and wood and stuff, most of those things.
00:24:53
Speaker
are self-taught and taught as an adult too. So I didn't actually get, you know, I didn't go to TAFE or have all of those wonderful groundings in sort of technical stuff as a kid. It's definitely been adult learning. This is what we want to hear is in feebled, anemic, sick dwellers without a handle on all of these traditional skills. I want to hear from people who actually are cultivating them actively into their later years because
00:25:20
Speaker
I resent the wholesome, unschooled upbringing of so many people now who are amazing and they have a handle on things well before their time. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it does. Yeah. So, I mean, sometimes I wish I had that as well, but I didn't get it. So I just had to nut stuff out. But a lot of it was, you know, a lot of it is just making a
00:25:45
Speaker
Commitment that you're going to I think more than anything else and I often hear people say oh, I'm not practical It's like you're human you've got an opposable thumb like two of them actually like it's I think I think we yeah we We tell ourselves pretty funny stories and so there's no way we could have got to where we are as a species if with with you know 80% of the population being impractical it's like
00:26:08
Speaker
everyone's practical you know it's just that you probably haven't cultivated that side very much which doesn't mean there are also people who are more dreamy and and do struggle sometimes with the physical stuff but it doesn't i've yeah i'm constantly inspired by people who go no i'm going to teach myself how to build a house and do you know i think i'm in house buildings one of those sort of
00:26:30
Speaker
it seems insurmountable and it's like i hadn't built a house before this i'd done a few little projects and that it's that thing of just building skills upon skills upon skills and this house is not some kind of like hokey old shack either it is quite the permaculture palace it's very beautiful very
00:26:51
Speaker
You know, it looks polished and it's proper. It's a little bit unpolished, I hope. Just in the kind of charming, rusty. Yeah, I really need to do a re-rendering on the outside. It's a bit shabby. But anyway. So Joel, when did you contract permaculture?
00:27:07
Speaker
Yeah, that's such a good question. My auntie's husband is Terry White and Terry was the editor of the very first permaculture journal in Australia. So I kind of grew up knowing this word and having this thing in the background. I've even got some like
00:27:27
Speaker
drawings of mine like you know very young six-year-old drawings on the back of like permaculture one uh permaculture two yeah yeah just like wonderful notes yeah that's right so for those at home there's
00:27:44
Speaker
David gave me a stack of these kind of culture principles and pathways book covers that were made redundant. And now I think that whatever I plot on these is going to be infused with the spirit, the Benignan spirit of permaculture. Beautiful. But back to Terry. Yeah. So he's my uncle. And so I've had this
00:28:02
Speaker
you know, his voice and interest in these things in the background. But he lived in Maryborough. We lived in the Dandenong. So we didn't see each other that much, you know, get together at Christmas time and occasionally other times.
00:28:16
Speaker
But yeah, so I think the for me, the big shift was, you know, moving out of home, moving into a place of my own and having to make decisions. Yeah. So actually kind of going, how do I want to
00:28:34
Speaker
live. Like what am I going to eat and how am I going to use energy? But not everyone asks those questions. I suppose I don't know. Yeah. And maybe not straight away, but they started to become really pressing questions for me. And
00:28:51
Speaker
And I suppose, yeah, I mean, I think it's something to do with my upbringing of that desire to live with integrity so that you don't say one thing and you do another. You actually live what you say. Is that because you saw that role modelled or because you saw it not role modelled and that disappointed you? It's definitely a big...
00:29:16
Speaker
thing in my family like it was definitely a you know that thing of being true to to your word and and what you're about and also the definitely the you know care of place was was instilled in me even though it might play out you know differently in the way that my my
00:29:36
Speaker
mum did things to the way I choose to do things. It's still, it's not like we disagree at the fundamentals about what we're about. Where did she get that from? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I think, um, yeah, I mean, my dad had it, had it too. I just, I mean, he just, he loved animals. He loved plants. He loved being out in nature. We walked a lot. We, you know, swimming mountain streams. It was like, it was just, you know, we would, we would go out into the wilds as
00:30:07
Speaker
as a family together. That was sort of what we did. So I think, yeah, I suppose I always had that instilled in me. But yeah, I think the the nitty gritty stuff came definitely with moving out of home and having to make decisions. And, and I suppose just wanting to like
00:30:24
Speaker
wanting to ask questions, wanting to actually kind of get to the heart of things. So I was going off on my own educational tangents that weren't inside permaculture, but kind of educating myself about
00:30:40
Speaker
You know, energy use and water use and food production and stuff. Yeah, but I studied sculpture like nothing to do with this stuff, you know, and kind of got got more into the that was when I was starting to kind of get my skills up with making things. But see, I did three years of a sculpture degree.
00:30:59
Speaker
And it's like I was making things but they didn't teach us how to make them. Like it was really poor and the skills stuff apart from foundry practice which we did learn to like do proper you know melting metal and stuff but almost everything else it was like it was really rudimentary so I was making these things out of steel but I like I could hardly weld I didn't know what I was doing
00:31:22
Speaker
So it was very much, and I think it was almost the culture of it's like, you've got to actually struggle to do this to, you know, struggle with the form, you know, anyway. So after that, I went back to that, I want to like learn welding properly. So I went to TAFE and did some welding tickets. And then like, from that, I realised you could study like, learn how to use a lathe and
00:31:44
Speaker
and milling machines and stuff so I started doing those things and then I kind of noticed that in TAFE you could also learn about renewable energy technology and stuff so I went great so all of these yeah post going to and doing a degree in higher education degree I discovered TAFE and all of the wonderful things that you could learn it was back when TAFE was by people who were really skilled
00:32:06
Speaker
in a particular area and actually quite love teaching and it was pretty well subsidized at the time too so it was pretty great just and so i just kept doing evening courses and kind of just trying to skill up in in whatever was interesting and thinking oh yeah i might be able to use that no
00:32:23
Speaker
seeing the possibility of how I might be able to make things better or whatever. But I've also been really involved in community groups too, so we moved in next door to the Burnley Neighbourhood Centre, which had sort of
00:32:40
Speaker
occasional care and a bit of a garden and a fledgling education program. And I got involved in the committee of management. I ended up being the president of the committee of management there and was working on getting courses up and running and things. And we got some funding to do some environmental education thing that the person who ran the community house was great at getting funding without necessarily knowing what we were going to do with it. And so I was sort of tasked with this thing of putting this
00:33:10
Speaker
course together and I was going all you know it's got to involve stuff about energy and water and food production and building design and I called my uncle Terry and I said you know do you know could you point me to some people who could teach some of these these things because I knew he had connections he said it sounds like a permaculture course okay and he directed me to a few people and I actually got Virginia Solomon who he'd recommended and she came in and basically
00:33:39
Speaker
Ran a permaculture course from that but we had we had subsidized positions for it through ACFI So we're able to offer it like you can do a PDC for 50 bucks if you're one of those one of those Subsidized positions, which is great. Um, so yeah, that was we got that going and then I did it so I actually attended the course and went and it was it was
00:34:01
Speaker
Even though it was for me, it was like, OK, here's this disparate set of subjects that I'm interested in. And in some ways, I probably didn't learn a huge amount about any of those. It was actually reading David Holmgren's stuff that actually became the sort of the connective stuff between all of those subjects of going, oh, these aren't disparate subjects. And the
00:34:23
Speaker
energy and the energetic stuff is kind of this fundamental that then all of that that kind of becomes the connection between these it's like why are we doing food production why are we catching water why it's the it's the you know all of those things that suddenly started to make sense and also were questioning some of the
00:34:42
Speaker
you know, the bigger systems that were operating around us and not take us in the direction that was towards life. It might be a nice way of putting it. Yeah, so I was really inspired by reading David's essays and stuff. That was before
00:35:04
Speaker
Permaculture Pathways came out and that... True fan. But yeah, when that came out too, that was great to then read that and go. And I remember because I'd learnt that we were using David's principles, then we were using the John Quinney ones, which I would get called Bill Morrison ones, which are different. They've got a different take. They're more garden oriented and they're more sort of
00:35:30
Speaker
practical, I suppose you'd say, whereas I think David's principles are that much more meta. But I think when you use them
00:35:40
Speaker
You're not just thinking about gardens, you're thinking much bigger and I think it's helpful. I'm very happy to teach from those principles because I think they're more whole than the earlier set, even though the earlier set is still really useful to delve into at times.
00:36:00
Speaker
Yeah so within a very short space of time but we didn't know we didn't there wasn't someone who was great on the energy stuff at all for the permaculture call so I started teaching on it pretty quickly after it was operating because it was like I actually had quite a wealth of knowledge around
00:36:19
Speaker
Energy use and stuff and yeah, so I was I was teaching and that's always been my home territory on permaculture courses So mostly if I'm if I'm called in to sort of do a guest slot on other people's courses It's around the sort of the tools and technology and and sort of applied energy use stuff Yeah, and it's still
00:36:40
Speaker
I, you know, I like it as a subject matter but I'm also frustrated by it too because it feels like actually the mainstream story on that has kind of actually got away from us and actually it's not, it's very un-permaculture in the way that we're thinking about energy at the moment and that worries me.
Green Energy Skepticism: Efficiency vs. Consumption
00:37:01
Speaker
Like the wolfing sheep's clothing, is that what you mean? Kind of, yeah, I suppose, you know,
00:37:09
Speaker
You know, for a while I worked at going solar, which was a renewable energy retailer back in the days before renewable energy was on everyone's roofs. And when people would come into the shop, you know, they wanted to do a standalone. Well, there was there was no grid interactive solar. There was pretty much standalone only.
00:37:29
Speaker
And, you know, more often than not, they were interested in it because they wanted to live somewhere that was a long way away from the grid or they got a quote for putting the grid on. It was 20 or 30 thousand dollars to run the polls.
00:37:42
Speaker
But the first thing we did with them was we'd look at their energy use and we'd go, you're going to have to cut this like dramatically. You're going to have to cut it down by like to a tenth of what you're currently using. But then we can do some stuff with lighting and we can maybe squeeze in a bit of refrigeration if you care for. And definitely you might be doing heating on that. You'll want an efficient wood stove and you'll want solar hot water to do your hot water needs, you know, and the electricity component would be really, really small.
00:38:10
Speaker
and I suppose what I've seen shift in that time is no one says how much energy are you using anymore and no one says you're going to need to get your energy used by you know to a tenth of its current usage we go cover your house with panels and and you know what whack on a air conditioner for your heating and whack on a you know heat pump for your hot water you're not actually using the sun directly you're not
00:38:34
Speaker
making your house function better you know you know curbing anything about your lifestyle and it's like is it. You know is it powered by the sun well kind of but it's not you know it's a far cry from what it was in the early two thousands and so yeah I worry about how that that narrative of just more and more and more.
00:38:57
Speaker
you know, including renewal, you know, like renewable energy, but more and more and more. It's like it's a worry and it's a worry because when you look at our global energy use, our fossil fuel use is not going down. We're using more fossil fuels, right? We're using more fossil fuels and we're using renewables on top of it to keep our energy energy curve growing. So what renewable energy that and when I say renewable energy, I must differentiate between what people mean when they say solar panels and wind turbines and electricity generated from those.
00:39:26
Speaker
and the sun that's shining in through our Northern glass at the moment and keeping our hot water hot, they are totally different. They're connected, but they are totally different. This makes me cry. I know that it's so convenient to just supplant one system with another, but the reality is so grim and devastating when you talk about our consumption and that actually these technological
00:39:53
Speaker
energy renewable systems are just feeding like enabling our ability to extract more and grow more. Yeah. And that ends in a bigger and more dastardly catastrophe at the end of the day. But I don't think that's that is not in the conversation that is not common knowledge. It's not we don't talk about why. OK. Why don't we talk about
00:40:15
Speaker
our use just straight up to understand what we actually need and how can we share that back to a planet within the boundaries of planet friendly quantity. And then what are some of those facts and figures that you know that you don't hear people talking about that really changes
00:40:34
Speaker
this solution that the green folks who we all thought we were at one point are pushing towards. Yeah, I mean I suppose that when I, you know, I do use some sort of big, you know, global energy graphs and stuff with my classes just to try and hammer some of this stuff home. So I think the big one is looking at total energy use across different types and kind of going, do you know what? We're not
00:41:03
Speaker
actually reducing our fossil fuel use but we are growing and and we're growing and the renewables is actually a growing component so we're just we're just topping up our energy use with this not actually coming to terms with with with cutting.
00:41:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I definitely mentioned that. And that's a, yeah, that's such a useful one for people to, to realize too, that, you know, we, our obsession with efficiency doesn't usually result in us actually using less energy. It results in us using more energy. That's the paradox. That is the paradox. You get more efficiency that invests back into the system. That's right. So you use, you get LED lights, but then you put more. Then you put them all over the place. You do more loads of washing with your
00:41:46
Speaker
your washing machine. With your supposedly efficient washing machine, yeah. Yeah, that's right. And it's got, I mean, Jevons was an early mechanical engineer working on steam engines, but kind of going every new generation of steam engine is more efficient than the last, but the steam engines just kept getting bigger.
00:42:01
Speaker
Why aren't we all working on our day? Because that's what the technology promise was. Yeah, that's right. But we know that that's not. Yeah, that's not doesn't doesn't play out like that. And I suppose that's the that's the catch of a growth economy, isn't it? It's like, you know, from the beginning of the industrial revolution, we've been replacing people with machines. This is not a new thing.
00:42:30
Speaker
But then, you know, it makes something like I mean, you know, as textiles at first, you know, people used to spend a lot of time spinning and weaving and cheering and doing all the things that were needed to make textiles. And it seemed like this great freeing up of of our time to not have to do that. They're not laying under a tree.
00:42:51
Speaker
that's right but became the bureaucrat but that's but that's the thing that the machines themselves yes they produce you know we have so much textile in the world now like far more than we need but it's not like where we haven't bought ourselves a whole lot of free time with that and i suppose it it still has that
00:43:12
Speaker
It still theoretically has that potential, but I do think there is something fundamental about machines and machine thinking that have got us stuck. And I see it played out again and again. We do it repeatedly. I've seen it in the compost sphere a lot. I don't know if you've seen the film, Ben and Bertha. Yeah, I may have. It sounds familiar. Someone I know made it. Yeah, it's a happen film.
00:43:39
Speaker
It's an interesting story, but by the end of it, the community composting enterprise has actually turned into a hunt for the great big machine.
00:43:47
Speaker
You know, and I find that really interesting because even within permaculture thinking, we're still totally beholden to the machine and we still think that the big machine is going to solve our problems. And, you know, it's like it's got its own, it is its own beast and we will continue to feed the beast. So, yeah. So the question went, you know, I'm called into teach.
00:44:10
Speaker
stuff on tools and technology. It's like, what is the, what's the right, where's the sweet spot? Where's the spot of intervention? Can I have a pencil? That's right. Yeah. And that's really tricky. I mean, I try again, because I don't think there are answers to these things. There are only principles and applications at different levels.
00:44:34
Speaker
you know I show people different things like I show people a scythe in action because it's an ancient tool but it's actually got this beautiful efficiency because of the way it couples to a human being actually similar to a bicycle like there's something really beautiful about the ergonomics of a human swinging a scythe like there is with a human riding a bicycle and so there are amazing sort of real efficiencies that can be gained and partly it's because with something like a
00:45:03
Speaker
aside it's the sharpness of the blade so it's the it's the sharpness and lightness of the blade that allows us to slice through grass as opposed to whack it so a brush cutter which is amazing and you know weighs a bit more than aside you know has all of this
00:45:21
Speaker
Phenomenal technology in it, but it basically just uses brute force to smash grass to smithereens Well, I don't think that the grass doesn't seem to do as well with it like definitely sized grass like cut grass recovers Yeah, that's right, but it is interesting too that you kind of go
00:45:46
Speaker
pretty much, you know, a person with a brush cutter can cut the grass about the same speed as a person with a scythe, an experienced person with a sharp scythe, but
00:45:59
Speaker
It's that the interesting points are there because you have to have experience and the side's got to be sharp. So you've got two skill levels there that are required. The person with the brush cutter almost needs no skill at all. And then they can do this thing. So if you could, you can arm, you know, 30, you know,
00:46:20
Speaker
I was going to make derogatory things, I was going to say workers. You can get people with brush cutters cutting a whole lot of weeds and it's like, well, we seem to have solved this problem.
00:46:33
Speaker
But actually, there's an inelegance in the whole thing. And yeah, and the sweet spot for me is like on a small property where I'm not like if I got much bigger than this, I would probably need to I need goats in or something to to manage this grass. But our spring growth that isn't on the chook side of the orchard, you know, I get in there with the side a couple of times in a good season, I might cut it.
00:46:57
Speaker
three or four times in a pulsate in a moment to get one cutting depending on how much moisture is in the soil and stuff but that works really well for me and not having to get the brush cutter out not having to fuel it up and not having to get nylon cord and stuff actually time-wise it works out but there's not many things like that where the non-mechanical version
00:47:19
Speaker
Beats the mechanical version and we know the other classic example would be bicycles we know in city circumstances or in or in smaller community areas the bicycle can out compete a car on short trip so sort of the under
00:47:34
Speaker
you know, under two or three eks, you know, definitely in with congested traffic and stuff, the bicycle can actually be a more efficient, I'm using air quotes there, tool for doing that particular job. Yeah, but I can tell you the bicycle is a lot more complicated than the side.
00:47:56
Speaker
You know, and so I suppose with everything, it's like, yeah, I look at, you know, I mean, I love bicycles and I keep a lot of old ones going and stuff. But I also know that I'm still dependent on the industrial system to keep that going, whereas with something like the side, it's like, well, I can make the snath the handle for it. I could even add a pinch
00:48:18
Speaker
maybe work on a on a blade with some of my blacksmithing mates and get something that was passable it wouldn't be that good it would take a few generations to build those skills back up again to be able to make good quality scythe blades but it's all it's it's low tech enough that it's achievable within a within a village kind of context whereas the bicycle's just not but
00:48:39
Speaker
bicycle is still a damn sight better you know like a sweeter spot technology than cars are because and I suppose that you know with the scythe it's that you're slicing through the grass with a sharp blade as opposed to whacking it with a nylon cord with a bicycle it's that you're moving
00:48:59
Speaker
your 75 kilo self and and a couple you know 15 20 kilos of bicycle as opposed to one ton or two ton of of steel and other stuff you know like cars are just insane but having said that we could have tiny little light cars too that only use a tiny fraction of the fuel but
00:49:19
Speaker
Why don't we? Well, safety issues or maybe get crushed underneath the truck. But then we ride our bicycles. And, you know, anyway, on a bicycle, you're invincible. Yeah, until you're not. All of those people I know who've been. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. I want to put a sticky note in the air about being a bridging generation, because I think that's a really interesting and somewhat
00:49:42
Speaker
you know it's fertile ground to cover but I want to go back to the green tech fact checking and just make sure that we can be clear on the pitfalls of that particular narrative. I mean I suppose yeah I have written some articles around this but I
00:50:00
Speaker
I've realized how complex it is and it does make it very hard to just convey it to nice little points. So, you know, go all electric, get off gas is so simple and it's so appealing because it's like there's a good thing and a bad thing.
Energy Solutions: Idealism vs. Realism
00:50:16
Speaker
But yeah, my
00:50:18
Speaker
Can I do this succinctly? I'll leave the articles and we'll use our consistent dopamine secretion to focus on them and read them in long form, but whatever you can offer us. I mean, I suppose that, you know, when someone says,
00:50:32
Speaker
Something is zero emissions because it's done with photovoltaics. It's like you have to step back from that and go hang in a sec. A lot of stuff got mined and a lot of energy went into making that thing. So it can't be zero emissions. It has emissions associated with it.
00:50:49
Speaker
And that just becomes a game of who gets left with the accounting of that. So if it gets made in China and we import it here and start using it here, do we pretend that there's no emissions associated with it? Because we didn't make them. And that's just silly games. So I would say at their best,
00:51:12
Speaker
photovoltaics and by that i mean solar panels that make electricity because there are solar panels that actually just make hot water or hot air and i'm pretty i'm a big fan of that i think that's great i think we can use the sun's energy to do what it does well which is heat things like all of our heat you know the vast majority of our heat sources can be
00:51:33
Speaker
be done by the sun with a bit of backup of wood. I love that combination. Yeah well that's what we're sitting in right now. I'm sweating like a hog. It is a winter's day and we're in your home that doesn't have a heater. We don't have a heater yeah that's right and we don't we really don't need it because the the we get enough winter sun and our house is oriented to make use of that. So yeah I think that can be so beautiful and simple and similar with our hot water system we don't
00:51:57
Speaker
If the sun's shining, we don't have to even fire up a wood stove to get hot water, but it's very simple, no pumps, no moving parts, all very basic and all repairable and sort of put togetherable by a sort of, you know,
00:52:12
Speaker
homesteaded with some skills. So yes, I think it's really important that we don't fool ourselves that there's no emissions associated or no energy associated with photovoltaics, but I suppose the other thing that we have to have to ask is
00:52:29
Speaker
What was like, what else are we going to do? Because that's the that's the big ecological question is what next? It's never it's never just this. It's like, yeah, but what else? And what are the ramifications of that? So, you know, if, for example, you're you've put photovoltaics on your roof and they're generating electricity and you're feeding some electricity into the grid and stuff like that.
00:52:53
Speaker
so well what happens to your energy use does it go up or down you know if it went up did we really use less energy in the end or did it actually push a different kind of behavior so i see that happening a fair bit where people are putting
00:53:10
Speaker
photovoltaics on their roof and then using them to justify things like purchasing more appliances or overseas holidays. Our brain just works like that, doesn't it? It does the kind of funny light accounting. Yeah, and it does that thing of, oh, this is good, therefore. Now, you know, yes, if you've got photovoltaics on your roof and the sun is shining, you're probably generating some electricity and maybe it makes sense to use it at that point.
00:53:34
Speaker
But then of an evening you're kind of fooling yourself if you think that those electrons are flowing off your roof They're not and you went well, I put those electrons onto the grid and say no you didn't they don't store You know electricity is one of like electricity is amazing because of how flexible it is You can do pretty much anything that we want to do with electricity because it can turn motors it can make heat and
00:53:58
Speaker
And it can do electronic electrical devices. It's phenomenal. But that's its superpower. But its great weakness is it stores really, really badly. And so when we when we turn something on in our house.
00:54:12
Speaker
Something's got to be spinning somewhere else. Something's got to be making that electricity somewhere else for that to flow. Therefore, the whole system's got to always have the capacity of everything that we want to switch on at any given moment. And until we as a society curb that,
00:54:28
Speaker
we're just going to keep generating problems. And so there's these great big peaks that happen in our grid in the morning and the evening. And they're not met for the most part by wind or solar. And that's when we all want to switch on every device in the house when we get up in the morning or before we go to bed. And that's the reality of our energy use. So until we start to bring that down,
00:54:51
Speaker
We can't really claim, you know, well, yeah, just I mean, yeah, silly claims about zero emissions are just we've got to take those things off the table. We've got to go. What's the what's the most appropriate use for this technology now? And how does it balance with what my energy demands are? And so, yeah, when I see people sort of charging up electric vehicles at night,
00:55:13
Speaker
And it's like, which is going to be the patent. Like people are going to get electric vehicles. They're going to plug them in at night because that's when they're parked at home in the garage and then they're going to drive them during the day, which is our social patent. It's like, actually.
00:55:26
Speaker
powered by coal fire. That's what it's powered by, because that's what's keeping the grid powered at night. Now, yes, there's this great promise that in some future we're going to have so much, you know, but it doesn't matter how many solar panels you put on, they're not going to make electricity at night. What was your response to a film like 2040?
00:55:48
Speaker
Oh, I find it really hard to watch things like that. I might actually not. I don't think Damon listens to this podcast. No, I don't think so. Yeah. And lovely guy. Yeah.
00:56:03
Speaker
I've kind of I've stopped like I just had to stop my subscription to Renew Magazine because I used to love it and it used to be the alternative technology association. It used to be called Soft Tech and it used to be about all these things of trying to actually not use as much energy or use the sun more directly to do things or make methane digesters. Like it had all of this amazing sort of tech that came out of the 70s and the oil shocks of the 70s. Very crowded in permaculture, which didn't mean that there weren't some
00:56:32
Speaker
things you know optimism about photovoltaics there but but again they were around very small amounts of energy used to do some lighting and some telecommunications so it's like if that's all we were using photovoltaics for i'd be on board the sponsorship change it happened no i i don't know but the but this the new i mean i call it the sort of the renew economy thinking because there's been this this organization that's been pushing that um but yeah i look i
00:56:59
Speaker
I'm cautious of I don't think it's a conspiracy but there are some very wealthy people you know people like Mike Cannonbrooks who have a lot of money in this game. Well they're looking ahead too and understanding that they're going to have to there is going to be something else that they're having to extract from.
00:57:18
Speaker
Yeah and basically there's a lot of money to be made in this space at the moment and you know it's if we get the whole like if AEMO the people who run the grid like if they're totally on board with this transition to renewables which they
00:57:36
Speaker
They're talking as if it's not a problem. They're talking as if that's what's going to happen. Yeah, there's an enormous amount of money to be made in that space. And that doesn't make it bad by its nature, but it does. It raises questions for me around
00:57:53
Speaker
You know, I know people who've worked in organizations where they are funded by some of these people who have their finger in a lot of these big, big business pies. And the message that they are pushing to all households is electrify everything because that's the answer. And so that's, yeah, when I put my permaculture hat on, I can't in good faith tell people to just go electric for everything because
00:58:17
Speaker
What happens if the grid goes down? How are you going to cook your food? How are you going to keep your house warm? So it's like, you know, diversity, definitely, you know, and I suppose this comes back to that thing of what's the, you know, when I when I teach a class, we quantify all of the renewable energy resources that are available to us by that. I don't mean photovoltaics. I mean the sun and the wind and moving water and gravity and all of these amazing things that are around us all the time and that we're bathed in.
00:58:46
Speaker
And then the next big question is, what do we need? And then maybe a little bit of what do we want, but what are we going to use energy for and what's fundamental and what's maybe not? And then we start to try and link those things up.
Critical Thinking and Consumption Challenges
00:59:00
Speaker
It's like, if the sun is shining and we can use it to warm our house, why would we add the complexity of the electricity grid to that equation? That's a whole network of stuff that you don't control that is
00:59:16
Speaker
energy intensive, cumbersome, might well fall over, does blackout, does brown out, does not always work, you know, does have, you know, transmission lines that blow over in storms that are apparently getting more and more intense all the time. It's like, do we really want to build bigger transmission lines that might then blow over in these big storms all for
00:59:40
Speaker
these things that we actually have available to us all the time. And I'm not against the judicious use of electricity or photovoltaics. I think they can be fantastic. But when I see them just plastered on every surface and that justifies a modern mainstream lifestyle, that really worries me. And I don't think it gets us anywhere like we need to get to.
01:00:03
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I need to lift my spirits because I'm feeling kind of emo. Was that the name of the company? A emo. It's the electricity ingredient. But I feel it's in the same way as we don't seem to be automatically thinking about our behaviors and our consumption first as a first port of call and thinking, you know, bigger picture. I also feel like we overlook
01:00:28
Speaker
um just the the thinking you know like where this is a thinking issue when you're talking it makes so stupendous levels of sense so i think inherently we are critical thinking creatures we love solving problems we have this ability to see how things fit together
01:00:44
Speaker
you know in a whole picture but for some reason our thinking has been maybe perverted to bring that word back in or what is it like the congestion in our brain that is not letting us freely think through these conundrums because it's it's just the way we're thinking about this stuff that doesn't seem to then lead to the kind of behaviors that make sense yeah yeah and it's it's tricky too because it's
01:01:13
Speaker
like anything that involves you buying something and there's an industry around sort of installing it and laying it on for you. It's very easy. And I suppose it's the, it's that which we've grown up with. It's very hard for like, we, we don't have that, um,
01:01:34
Speaker
example of people around us being really resourceful. Further away from that too. Most of us don't have grandparents who just went out the back and fixed things up with a bit of wire and whatever. Like actually, most of our grandparents bought all of their stuff too. We're three or four generations. That's right. So it's much harder for us to find those living examples of people just
01:01:58
Speaker
making do and thinking about things and finding those localized, you know, responses. And so vulnerable in a way to advertising and those kind of forces, the sophistication of the advertising industry. Yeah, yeah, there is that. There is that.
01:02:17
Speaker
I think we really, really want to do the right things. We want to be righteous people. We don't want to be bad people. And so if someone's telling you that there's this thing that you can get that makes you righteous, I totally understand why it's appealing. It's a lot more uncomfortable to sit with that thing of going, do you know what? I ride my bike, but I know that my bike is a part of an international
01:02:43
Speaker
you know, movement of goods and exploitation and stuff like that. And even my bike is not, you know, it's not pure that, you know, I can't just manufacture a chain or whatever to it. So to accept that sort of complicity and to also go, I'm kind of I'm finding the best spot I can somewhere down that, you know, that sort of energy descent ladder, not thinking that it's a it's not an exercise in purity. It's just an exercise in doing what I can with what I've got.
01:03:13
Speaker
But yes, I think the the alternative that is laid on to us is that you is you consume your way out of that problem out of those feelings. And, you know, we know that that doesn't work. We know it doesn't work. But it's yeah. But it's very appealing. It's very appealing. What are some
01:03:36
Speaker
chinks that you see in that armour as a teacher, as someone who's out there in the community observing people. What are those little inroads?
Permaculture and Food: Energy Adaptation Issues
01:03:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I suppose it is interesting how
01:03:54
Speaker
But I probably find it hard for my core areas, which are around things like how we heat our water and how we cook our food and all of those sort of those kinds of things.
01:04:07
Speaker
Often people are so stuck with those, but they can get into food production. You know, and I suppose that is that's kind of permaculture's Trojan horse, too. It's like people want to grow their own food. And, you know, like crazily enough, in during Covid, you know, we brought up all the seedlings, we bought all the seeds like there was no food shortage.
01:04:26
Speaker
But people's immediate response was to worry about where their food was coming from. None of them kind of went, wow, I better build a rocket stove because I'm not sure where the energy is coming from, which is fine. But it's and I'm glad I'm glad there is sort of this innate thing because food is fundamental. It's like, you know, even if you can't cook food, make sure you've got something to eat. But
01:04:48
Speaker
But yeah, so I think that probably is the, that's the gateway that a lot of people come to permaculture through. And often they find the things like passive solar design and different kinds of ways of getting our energy and things like that, they find it really hard. They find it really hard in. So I suppose, I wouldn't say I'm thoroughly frustrated, but I know that a lot of the,
01:05:15
Speaker
the areas that I've taught in and consulted on and encouraged people with. It's like it's been really hard for people to actually take those things up and step into them. Yeah. And that's because. You know, like.
01:05:35
Speaker
So a classic example would be, you know, like I work with a couple who want to do a passive solar renovation on their house and we work through some how to let the winter sun in and put some thermal mass in the house and catch, you know, store that heat better.
01:05:51
Speaker
and then they kind of, you know, work out what they want and then they go to a building designer or a builder or whatever and it ends up getting redesigned and most of those design features get worked out of them or they work out the only way they can do it is to do it themselves but then the bank won't lend them the money. So there's, you know, because they want to be owner builders and banks don't
01:06:13
Speaker
do that because they say it is too big a risk so I feel like there's a whole lot of other things or you know like rocket stoves like I've helped lots of people make rocket stoves that sit
01:06:24
Speaker
on the outside of their house because to bring them into the house means compromising the insurance on your house because it's not an approved device. So there's a lot of sort of technical and systematic things that make it very hard for us to sort of integrate some of those technologies into our modern way of doing things. And so many of the things that we've done in this house with things like gravity feed, water, dry composting, toilet,
01:06:52
Speaker
you know, fundamental passive solar design, you know, rocket boosted, wood boosting for our hot water, all of those things, like so many of those things that you can't, you couldn't go to any builder and ask for those things and get them. So I had to do them and I had to push for them and I had to know how they all worked and I had to
01:07:14
Speaker
You know, I had a plumber who had to sign up on stuff, but I basically showed him how all of the hot water stuff was going to go together because he'd not put one together before. You know, so so there's there's a lot of stuff where I get why it's really hard for people to make that leap. And it kind of takes a it takes a, you know, stepping a little bit outside the system and taking a few risks and doing things like going, you know what, maybe the house isn't insured and we just have to be really careful with it.
01:07:42
Speaker
Yeah, great. Yeah, this is I'd love to bring in Joel's advice column, which is around if you had your most radical hat on and you do have a radical hat on, what is your advice to people who are prepared to really start living a permaculture principled existence and thinking critically, like what are the most radical things we can start doing if we're prepared to go there? Yeah, I mean, that's a very good question. I mean, I would think that
01:08:13
Speaker
You know, if you can, like I like working down through, through the things that are most important to you and the things that we tend to use the most energy for and work down through the least, you know, so things like cooking, keeping our houses warm, heating some water. They're pretty fundamental. They also happen to be three of the biggest energy users in people's homes. So it's like, actually we can use the sun.
01:08:40
Speaker
and wood boosting and maybe some biogas to do pretty much all of those and not need direct electricity for doing those. That would be sort of my advice is get those bits right and maybe don't worry so much about say, you know, your lighting and your telecommunications and stuff, because they're minuscule. I mean, generally speaking, if you're already a reasonably efficient house,
01:09:06
Speaker
maybe don't worry so much about those. So for example, we're still connected to the grid and we don't have photovoltaics, but we use like less than two kilowatt hours of power a day, even with some machines and stuff. What's the average? 16 to 20 for the average Australian household.
01:09:22
Speaker
Yeah so that's because almost all of those you know like there's no electricity doesn't get used for heat hardly at all in this house because that uses so much electricity to do that so we tend to just use it much lower on the on the on the sort of electrical scale.
01:09:40
Speaker
So yeah, I would say get those things right because then it doesn't matter if the grid shuts down, you still got those fundamentals right. It doesn't matter if the gas network gets shut down, you've still got those things. So it's like get your cooking and your basic comfort and some hot water sorted out. And it might be, I mean, the beautiful thing is a rocket oven in your backyard
01:10:06
Speaker
even in an urban setting you can still cook on it you know you can actually get a lot of the fuel from just collecting twigs in parks and stuff like that so i mean if everyone was doing it maybe there'd be no sticks for the dogs it'd be a major stick shortage in
01:10:21
Speaker
in Melbourne in some some magical future but but the reality is there's a lot of sticks there's a lot of sticks at the moment um and that's all you need to to run most rocket stoves so that you know and it might be that you're like you know
01:10:37
Speaker
for you it's like maybe if you're renting and you can't rip out whatever device is there and don't in some ways because it's like well that's a backup too because there's occasions you know I don't always cook everything on wood you know so I'll sort of rotate things around but it's like if things get tight if I've got no additional power I've got the sticks you know and I can run my rocket oven and cook food in it
01:11:05
Speaker
And that's pretty fundamental. Like it's really important that we can, you know, cook our food. And what is a rocket oven or rocket stove for people who haven't heard that term before? Yeah, so it's a particular way of burning wood in a pretty high efficiency device. I mean, crazy thing is there's so many versions of them. But if you go back to sort of the fundamentals of the guy who invented them, they are
01:11:30
Speaker
They are insulated, they have a heat riser above the flame, so they basically suck a lot of air in behind the wood and they insulate so they throw the heat back at the fire, which means the fire burns hot, which means it burns clean, which means you burn off all of the things that would be particulate pollution, so you should have
01:11:50
Speaker
almost no smoke, just a little bit at start up and finish. And then you try and place a cooking device over the top of that that makes the best use of that heat too. So there's, and that's for me, I don't really, I use J2 Rocket.
01:12:06
Speaker
Stoves, they're a particular variety that you look up and I tweak those designs a little bit but most of my obsession is with what cooking device we plonk on top of them. So really efficient ovens or really efficient cooking devices that sit on top of of rocket stoves is my particular
01:12:27
Speaker
area of interest because you can burn wood really efficiently and then waste it all by just plonking a pan on top of it. I love the one that we cooked lunch on at the Castlemaine Permaculture Club when Ostie was there and I think maybe you just made it at a wack shop and the roast vegetables and meat in the middle were just sensational but then so this one didn't have this but I've heard you also have like a water, you heat water as well. Yeah so I've got a unit that will sit on that
01:12:57
Speaker
on the flue of a rocket oven and will make hot water with the waste heat off the oven. So it's kind of stacking functions. It's so freaky cool. You feel like the smartest person in the world cooking dinner on that and also having your cup of tea after. Yeah, that's right. And yeah, you wash up water instead of there once you've done about 20 minutes of cooking usually boils three liters of water. And these are things that people can make with their own two hands. That's right. And I try, I mean, I teach
01:13:24
Speaker
I teach workshops and I've got an e-book with Tim Barker, who's a great rocket innovator. So yeah, there's an e-book out there that I have collaborated on. And yeah, I suppose I just like, I mean, I don't want to just sit and make them all day and sell them to people. I want people to understand how they work and to share them with other people. So yeah, I teach making them at workshops with, you know, often with like graduate
01:13:54
Speaker
permaculture classes or whatever, whoever's wanting to put them on. But yeah, I'm more interested in the skill sharing than I am in just making things because it's like, yeah, I've got plenty of my own projects to get on with. So don't particularly want to just be churning out the same design again and again. And I also really like the innovation too. So it's like if I'm going to build one.
01:14:15
Speaker
I'm building my next iteration of it with my slight tweaks and seeing whether that works well or not. Yeah, so that's a really practical suite of resilience, building activities, figuring out what you use most of and it might be around cooking and heating and water and that kind of things.
Simplicity in Modern Times: A Reflective Yearning
01:14:34
Speaker
And establishing that in the home in case the power goes down and so you know that you can do that really efficiently too.
01:14:42
Speaker
mentally coming back to my flapping in the wind sticky note around I want to ask you about kind of peacemaking with ourselves and the time and the context that we find ourselves in, maybe being one of a few generations who are remembering this body of knowledge and skills that we've dropped away from. And if you have any thoughts around being a human in this time and maybe being a human who's
01:15:09
Speaker
yearning to live a more connected from scratch roots down kind of existence, but knowing that we're going to be a bridge and it's going to be a longer bridge, potentially. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Good question. Good question. I suppose I think
01:15:28
Speaker
You know, I probably did think 20 years ago that all of this was going to happen, you know, that we're going to get a big energy transition and it was going to be a big change towards using less fossil fuels and partly that was going to be driven by fossil fuels actually sort of running out on us.
01:15:46
Speaker
but also that we would make these great choices and that we would sort of move to a much lower energy use kind of society. And it's like, it doesn't look like that's happening. It doesn't look like that's playing out like that. So I suppose I'm cautious of predictions, but I'm also, I keep looking at what we have and going, it's very, very precarious. And I don't, yeah, I don't think that we can just keep what we've got going going
01:16:18
Speaker
But I think there is like your question about peacemaking I think is really important because I think at the heart of it is us being okay with ourselves and not with all of our stuff. And even to like listening to the radio news this morning and they would, it's like a recession is just on the horizon. There's all the predictions and it hasn't quite happened yet, but it's gonna happen.
01:16:46
Speaker
We're the richest people in the richest point in history and one of the richest countries in the world. And we're freaking out because maybe just around the corner is like us being having to live with just slightly, slightly less. Sell our seventh home. It's like slightly less. Well, no, I mean, it's real. It is real for a lot of people. It is real. And there's a whole lot of people in terribly, terribly stressed at the moment. And it's not I don't want to I don't want to pretend that's not
01:17:14
Speaker
happening. But it is also like, how can it be that the richest people in human history on the richest, in the richest, one of the richest countries in the world can be so distressed about taking a very slight hit to our standard of living by our modern perception of what that is, you know, like, so. So yes, I suppose I have for a long time been thinking I'm going to have to learn how to live with less and I need to
01:17:44
Speaker
Not just for that to be a, you know, how am I going to hunker down and yeah, but actually how do I be okay in myself with less each year rather than more each year. And then also then coming to the terms with the fact that others around me are not going to take that line down and that actually we're probably going to spend
01:18:06
Speaker
probably, you know, probably the rest of my life, there will still be people telling stories about how we've got to get back to how things were and use more energy and make America great again. And, you know, like it'll be, we'll still be talking as if we're going to get back to the glory days of peak fossil fuel use. We're talking to each other on who knows. But but I think it's so yet. It's kind of it's not the utopia vision.
01:18:35
Speaker
And it's also that one of, like, what's our role? Because I feel like one of, I mean, John Michael Greer has that great saying about, you know, collapse alien beat the rush. And it's like, you know, he's got this beautiful image of like he details this couple in the US who like decided to live totally Victorian lifestyles and dress in Victorian, but also use Victorian technology and people were lambasting them and he was going,
01:19:04
Speaker
that's just so ace it's like what's wrong with that there's these people just deciding to do this thing totally different and it's like it might end up being a really cool thing and there might at some point go wow you've got a whole lot of things that
01:19:17
Speaker
We've lost that we should have actually hung on to and here you are in the community, able to supply us with this or give us some lessons or whatever it was, you know, but, but, you know, his idea that you kind of set up camp somewhere down the energy descent ladder and just make home there and enjoy it, you know, and then if people catch up with you.
01:19:36
Speaker
And I suppose it's the if it's not the when people catch up with us. It's like maybe we'll have something to offer and we'll be smiling and going, you know what, this funny peasant lifestyle is not so bad and it's pretty, you know, it's quite quaint here. And I suppose it's that, but also being OK, like genuinely being OK in ourselves about that not playing out like we think to. I think that's the hard thing. It's like maybe it will be messier and and how to be
01:20:06
Speaker
you know involved in peacemaking when the world is at war you know which is that's possible it's very possible you know and i don't i'm again i don't make predictions about these things um but but i do yeah i think we still need to be comforted in what it is that we're doing and why we're doing it um and not lose sight of of like what the what the good
01:20:34
Speaker
in it is for ourselves, for our immediate community and broader, but the broader is like, I don't know, Wendell Berry questioned the whole think global act local thing because he can, you know, global thinkers are the ones who are causing the problem. It's people who don't have connection to place that are making all of these problems, don't think global.
Local Solutions: Composting and Community Engagement
01:20:57
Speaker
And it's like, I think, you know, obviously it's an
01:20:59
Speaker
It's an antidote to a glib response and there's some truth in being able to think globally and being able to take the big picture and we talk patterns to details in permaculture and that is important but I do think that it's like I don't think we're going to think a global solution
01:21:17
Speaker
to the problems that we're facing. I think it would just be a whole set of little responses to place, you know, and I suppose that's why for me doing something like being involved in a community composting initiative actually has been the most life-giving thing I've done for ages because there's a lot of people who want to do it. I don't have to push it.
01:21:35
Speaker
i don't have to push something down people's throats people are queuing up to become community composters in this thing and i'm working with a team of people it's not just me it's like this is cool you know so i'm loving that and for me that's a bit of a it's a bit of an antidote to the
01:21:52
Speaker
you know, trying to encourage people to do stuff that they just really struggle to do or to make real. Yeah, it has to be fun. I think it should be fun. Yeah, well not just fun too, but I suppose it's like I think with the tools and technology stuff, you know, quite possibly the stuff that I am playing
01:22:13
Speaker
weave and the spaces I'm playing in people aren't ready for yet you know it's another decade or two down the track that this stuff's and you know I'll keep doing it for my own purposes but it's like it's not like it's a wave that's just ready to take off right now you know and that's that's all right yeah maybe a bit painful but yeah well I think what I mean is like tapping into that spirit of experimentation and curiosity and
01:22:41
Speaker
silliness can sometimes be a way to get us through painful or in toughening experiences like we just turned off the gas at our place, the rental, and it's been I'm trying to laugh when I'm running back and forward from the fire where we've got a big like pop of bubbling, bubbling water which is now our hot water system into the frigid cold bathroom to kind of duck, bathe myself in type of water and I'm
01:23:07
Speaker
trying to just smile about that. I actually feel like there's something in my spirit and maybe the human spirit that relishes that texture and splintery challenge in some contexts when you have the spiritual space I suppose to enjoy such a thing and I know it doesn't go for everyone but I feel like what if that was framed with a little more lightness like it can actually be just
01:23:32
Speaker
a crazy experiment that you're running in your household and the kids are like squealing because they're so freezing and so over you cooking on the fire. But really, it's a great story to tell people. Yeah, that's right. Did you want to talk about Yimby? I was just going to, I mean, it feels like such a beautiful wrap for the conversation where we just were, but I also don't want to miss that opportunity, that really passionate project that you're involved in. Yeah, it'd be good to hear about it because I think I feel like it is one of those sort of interesting
01:24:02
Speaker
points that's like it sits between
01:24:05
Speaker
my tools and technology area and the sort of the community development stuff that I suppose, yeah, that's exciting. Yeah, so, you know, I think I said before, yes, in my backyard, it's a community composting project, but it's different to anything else that I've been able to come across. And I think we didn't realize how radical it was when we started it. So this isn't based on something that you've seen elsewhere? No, we just invented it.
01:24:32
Speaker
yeah so the idea is rather than rather than
01:24:38
Speaker
get all of the people together and make compost together. We figured most of the people need the compost in their backyards for their food production so that there's enough in our, in the township of Castlemain and Surrounds, there's enough people who are interested in food production that there's productive backyards around the place. People want compost and they want good quality compost. You can't really buy good quality compost. And in their street,
01:25:04
Speaker
There's a whole lot of people currently throwing food scraps in a bin and sometimes they don't want to do that, but that's they don't have time to do composting or whatever.
01:25:15
Speaker
So what we figured is if we find one person in each street and they deliver buckets around to their neighbours and on midnight, they just collect those buckets and those buckets are just for those households to put food scraps in. So that would, and it's a nice bucket so it can be on the kitchen bench if they want and they return a perfectly clean bucket. So it's part of the service is that they get a cleaned bucket returned. And each of our composters then collect those buckets up usually from about
01:25:42
Speaker
10 to 15 households and then they take them back to their yard and they layer those food scraps up with local carbon rich sources, leaves, straw, woody garden pruning, things like that. Are they responsible for acquiring those too? Sorry. So we assist with that but we don't promise anything. So we've been doing a bulk purchase of straw and we have
01:26:05
Speaker
autumn leaf collections and we've got a whole lot of wool bags that we've distributed out to the community to people to put their autumn leaves in and then we'll collect them and deliver them to the to the composter so we we help with that but we kind of need people to pitch in too and they
01:26:22
Speaker
Yeah, and they might they might also add some manure and we encourage them to, you know, add a bit of soil and seaweed and other magic ingredients, but they don't have to. And they then so each week they build a layer of a hot compost pile. And this is we've got this system for hot composting, which I've
01:26:40
Speaker
you know developed here over years because we've been hot composting our humanure waste as well as all the stuff from our kitchen our garden but i realized that you know you get told again and again that hot composting has to be made as a cubic meter bay all in one go to make it hot but
01:26:58
Speaker
I worked out a few years ago that actually you could just keep adding to a compost pile and keep it hot, keep it in that 55 degree plus range as you built it over about five to seven weeks. If it's shorter than five weeks, it tends to collapse down a fair bit, which is what built in a day compost piles do as well.
01:27:20
Speaker
And if you go longer than seven weeks, the bottom of it's actually breaking down more. So it's more finished at the bottom than you want it to be. And then when you go to turn it, it doesn't heat up as well. So that's the sweet spot is around the five to seven weeks. So build your cubic meter bay, but you do it as increments over the five to seven weeks. So that's what each of our composters do in their backyard.
01:27:41
Speaker
And then at the end of that period, once that last addition is also heated up to 55 degrees for three days, which is an EPA sort of guideline. They then turn that compost pile sometimes with help, because we've got a whole bunch of volunteers who come in and help with compost turning. And they let that heat up again and then they turn it one more time and then it rests for usually from start to finish about six months. And then it's had worms go through it and it's wonderful and it's theirs.
01:28:09
Speaker
So the composters are paid in compost. The interest in the compost being of high quality is theirs because they put it in their garden. But we try and make it as socially connected as possible outside of them doing that in their backyard. But the beautiful thing is they're
01:28:27
Speaker
Unlike other community composting systems where you put in a lot of time and effort and often you don't get very much compost out of it, our composters get paid in compost and also they're in their street. So instead of a truck going up and down the street and collecting green waste in a bin, we've got a person walking up and down the street so they actually know their neighbours, they're looking out for each other
01:28:47
Speaker
They're often, you know, like we've had, you know, times when people haven't put their buckets out and someone's been unwell and they've been able to, you know, alert people or, you know, during during the pandemic, people were looking out for each other and make sure that people were getting groceries and stuff. So our our social connection with it is so much better than a truck driving up and down the street.
01:29:08
Speaker
And then our composters are connected into a community of other enthusiastic composters. So yeah, Matt, what we do as the sort of central organizing thing is we find the composters, we train them up and we make sure they've got really, really good composting skills.
01:29:24
Speaker
We do an apprenticeship with them so they go around to other local composters and see how they do their operation and then we mentor them through their first build to make sure that they are getting it right and getting it hot. They weigh their buckets each week so we know how much food scrap is being collected. They have a thermometer so they're putting that in their
01:29:45
Speaker
compost pile each week and feeding in the temperature of the active pile and the most recently turned pile and we've just got a web thing that they log in so we can basically look up any of the composters and go oh their number of buckets they're getting is dropping off maybe they've lost a few neighbors and we need to go and help them do door knocking in their street again find some more local people or the temperatures are a bit low maybe they need a bit of a hand with you know something not quite right
01:30:12
Speaker
But yeah, trying to do that as an assistance measure. Wow. Yeah. I'm so glad that you could give us the spiel on that. Yeah. I'm wondering what's your coverage in Castle Main? Yeah. So at the moment, we've got about 23 composters active. We're servicing about 300 households plus the number of businesses. And we've got another seven or eight people like trained and ready to activate. We just have to go in and do that.
01:30:40
Speaker
that next stage with them. I reckon there'd be a lot of RGB to be the composite officer. Everyone wants to be there. Well, that's right. And that's partly, we are talking to the local council about this being, because we don't currently have a green bin and they are getting a lot of pressure from the state government and from the community to put one on. And we're kind of going, this is a better solution. And we've kind of
01:31:04
Speaker
We've modelled how we think it can grow up and roll out across the Shire, but it takes time because you've got to train people and stuff. So it can't just be, we switch it on tomorrow like a truck and bin company can do. But we believe that the outcomes are so much better, both for nutrient cycling and greenhouse reduction and for the community benefit that actually it's like, please let us do this. So we have had a meeting with the Environment Minister because he's been involved in
01:31:33
Speaker
new rules coming out around making councils have the new the four bin system with their colour-coded leads and I totally get why they they want to have this consistent rollout across the state and I get that and they obviously want people to know which bin you're supposed to put things in and all of that because there's been such an issue with people just plonking things in wherever and terrible contamination rates but I
01:31:58
Speaker
I think that comes with people caring, not with people being colour-coding leads. And I think caring actually comes from a neighbour knocks on your door and says, can you please put some food scraps in a bucket? Why would you say no? You could be a rabid climate denier and still want to give your neighbours some food scraps.
01:32:16
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? You don't have to join any dots other than someone's asking to do this and it's like, and they're going to return a clean bucket for me. It's a pretty good deal, really. What's the rejection rate? Really low. Really low. I mean, no, that's not true. About 50% because people are already composting.
01:32:36
Speaker
and that's the other thing too is that we yeah but that's but that's great because their perspective future yimpies when when the when the person who's been doing it for the for the last little while goes do you know what i've got to go take a break from this it's like there's plenty of other people in the street who can pick the pick up their their route um yeah which is what we
01:32:55
Speaker
And it's what we want too because we don't want to service 30 households in a street. We only want to service 10 or 15 in a street because everyone else can do their own thing because they're also... So the other thing that we're doing with the project is trying to educate the community about good composting practice. So we've actually got a column in the local paper, a composting column. It's been running for the last year just with composting advice.
01:33:19
Speaker
going out to both Macedon Ranges and Mount Alexander Shires. So good. And again, we don't know of anything else like it in the world where there's a composting column in a local paper. How did this idea come to you? It was at that table with a few people, my Uncle Terry, who I mentioned earlier, Lucy Young,
01:33:41
Speaker
and a guy called Bill Grant. So Bill sort of had experience in the waste industry. Lucy was one of the key instigators of growing abundance, which is this great community project that emerged in Castle Main. And she and I have sort of talked about stuff in the waste space for a long time, and I've done some composting education for a project that she'd done.
01:34:00
Speaker
And yeah, she'd seen something where people in New Zealand, where people were sort of dropping off buckets, which I think was that the Benin Bertha story, an issue here, but I can't remember the name of that. And so she was a bit excited about it.
01:34:15
Speaker
composting thing and Terry had this idea about compost sort of consultants you know going out and sort of helping people to compost better and then we kind of came up with it so yeah and it's had several iterations and we've learned we've got heaps better and I think the big thing that we've learned is how to train people to be good composters because we've got this quite quite a stringent
01:34:38
Speaker
process. We're quite particular about it because we want it done really well and we want to make sure that it's hot and effective and not smelling and all of that stuff because the project hinges on that. So we've got better at our recruiting and training and stuff. But the core project
01:34:57
Speaker
principles are there we're trying to connect people up with each other we're trying to cycle nutrients we're trying to get organics out of landfill you know and yeah build something that's a bit bit different yeah so brilliant and how can people learn from you when they're in no way affiliated with yeah and so if you go to the yimby compost website all of our
01:35:20
Speaker
training articles are there on the website and if you if you're in Victoria we do offer training outside of the like we you can come to councilman and do some of our training because we've usually got sort of half our positions allocated for for prospective composters and the other half for the general public so if you want to learn our our continuous hot composting process we do teach that and then I suppose the other thing is
01:35:49
Speaker
If you reckon it's good, try it somewhere else. Because we think it, you know, obviously it's like we said from about everything. Any solution is site specific. It's community specific. So you might need to tweak it to make it work in your area. But we think there's some really good things about it. And that whole thing of actually just keeping the food scraps in the street,
01:36:14
Speaker
and doing the composting in the backyard and the compost are being responsible for that, I feel like there's some real strengths in those aspects of it and then just making sure that you resource those people really well so that the job of the project becomes around supporting those things to happen rather than doing, you know, we don't actually do compost for anyone, they do it all, but we help, you know.
Broadening the Energy Narrative: Seeking Simplicity
01:36:41
Speaker
Well, this has been an hour and a half of incredible and inspiring stuff. I'm really, really excited by everything you talked about. I wonder if there was anything I haven't asked you that you meticulously prepared a response to. Now I'm closing the conversation. Was there anything else, John? I loved your questions and I'm kind of wanting to peek at them because I thought they were so great. But no, I don't think so. I think we've covered a
01:37:11
Speaker
a fair range of things that are good to cover but i'm sure there'll be many installments of these conversations with people i think read bits that are on the cards and yeah yeah and i think that um definitely honing down the the argument not against
01:37:29
Speaker
mainstream renewables, but for a broadening of the way we think about renewable energy and our energy needs. I think that there's something needs to happen in that space. And I've, yeah, I think I'm both disappointed and angry around how that narrative has been taken. And I think every time I sit down to write about it, it's just, I'm just angry and I need to find a way of
01:37:50
Speaker
speaking excitedly and creatively about it which is you know which is it's all it's all hearing the things that i do in my life it's not you know it's not like i can't find those things but i suppose you do have to
01:38:04
Speaker
you have to do a bit of debunking and it's like how do you how do you do that in a way where you kind of go you ask the right questions of of those arguments so that people can actually see the empress in clothes they kind of go oh yeah it's not can't be as shiny as we hoped it was going to be a lot of work yeah so i'm not i i want to work in you know that's something i'm quite passionate about but i am
01:38:27
Speaker
But I know it's not, you know, one little voice. And as you pointed out, I don't I almost don't exist online. So partly I don't have a big profile to to work off. You're not a megaphone. And maybe that's a good. I'm definitely not that. And I think I want it. Yeah. In some ways, I feel like I'm at a stage where I actually want to
01:38:49
Speaker
be less noisy and more local and quieter and disconnect. I mean I keep looking at my computer and I've got a landline too and I keep looking at both of those things and going, do you know what I could imagine? I could imagine a future where I don't even use those things and that'd be even nicer and smaller and more local and you know that's my response to AI is to go, oh well if AI can make these images then I won't look at any images that someone I know hasn't made.
01:39:14
Speaker
Um, and, or, you know, I'm not going to listen to music unless it's someone singing it to me or something like that. Oh, you did have a good question about, about, um, what was it? Permaculture week spots or... Oh, when you leased permaculture. Yeah, when I leased permaculture. I did think about that one. Uh, I think it's, um, amplified music. I play in a band I have since my, like, since teenage and doom and I, uh, yeah, I still write music and I love playing amplified.
01:39:39
Speaker
rock and roll and so that's probably my you know it's like I like my acoustic guitar too and I do you know if worst comes to worst I'll be okay with my acoustic guitar but that's right yeah how do I keep my valve amp going it's not very many watts but it's yeah
01:39:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's right, that's right. So it's probably, no, I'm sure there's actually much worse things than that, but that was the one that came to mind. It's like, that'd be the hardest to give up for me. He'll give you that job. I don't think I have to give it up quite yet. Not quite yet. All right. Well, thank you so very much.
01:40:18
Speaker
If you feel as inspired as I do off the back of Joel's interview, please dig into the show notes or the mass of resources that I've linked on Substack, including a video tour of Joel's solar passive home, a matzah of hot composting resources and how to guides for building your own rocket oven.
01:40:35
Speaker
Joel leads permaculture design certificates and workshops pretty regularly around central Victoria and also in Melbourne, so look out for those. In other news, I am totally besotted by the podcast's Patreon community. It's proving a wonderful place to road-test ideas and grist over reskillience themes as a group.
01:40:55
Speaker
Thank you to everyone who believes in the show enough to donate even in the face of this financial crunch and it's starting to feel like I can take resculience a little more seriously as a job rather than a side hustle. So deep and abiding gratitude for ceding this possibility and a huge shout out to new patrons Meg, Drew, Joe and Christine.
01:41:18
Speaker
Welcome and thanks for being here. I'll catch you all next week for another quietly radical conversation and feel free to chat to me in the meantime on Instagram or via email katy at katy.com.au